6'5" x 13'2" Persian Soltanabad Mahal Rug | Rust All-Over Palmette Field | 1930s Antique

Knotted in the 1930s on village looms in the Soltanabad district of central Persia, this 6'5" x 13'2" rug has the long gallery proportions that older Mahal weavers favoured, roughly twice as long as it is wide and made for a room that runs deep. The wool is hand-spun and the pile has worn down evenly over ninety years, which is exactly what gives an antique piece of this type its flat, painterly surface and its soft handle underfoot. Nothing here is machine-regular: the field drifts between brick and salmon, the drawing leans slightly as the loom shifted, and the ivory ends are a little warmer at one end than the other. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the origin, age and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field carries a large-scale all-over design built around a central spine of vines that branches out into broad serrated leaves, angular palmettes and hooked blossoms, all drawn at a scale you can read from across the room. Ivory spandrels fill the 4 corners and pinch the field into an implied long medallion without any medallion actually being woven, a trick the Soltanabad workshops used constantly on gallery-length pieces. The main border is a deep navy band of alternating rosettes and turtle palmettes linked by a thin vine, framed on both sides by narrow rust and ivory guard stripes carrying a running barber-pole and small flowerheads. Look closely at the close-up images and you can see how the weaver filled the open ground with small detached leaves, clusters of squares and tiny sprigs so that no part of the field is ever empty.

Rust, Navy and Ivory Color Palette

Rust is the anchor, a madder-based terracotta that shifts through brick, salmon and a dusty coral where the abrash moves across the width, and the low pile lets the paler underlayer of each knot show through so the ground reads as a soft, sun-warmed tone rather than a solid block. Against it the navy border sits almost black in shadow and opens into true indigo in daylight. Light blue is used sparingly and to great effect in the leaf tips, the small palmette hearts and the guard-stripe flowerheads, where it jumps forward against the rust. Ivory and cream do the structural work in the corner spandrels and the outer guard, and there are quieter supporting notes throughout: sage green in the leaf outlines, camel and soft brown in the vines, and occasional flickers of pale gold and rose in the flowerheads. It is a warm, low-contrast palette that sits easily with wood floors, leather and aged brass.

Soltanabad Weaving and the Mahal Tradition

Soltanabad, the old name for the town and district now centred on Arak in central Persia, became the great commercial weaving region of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Mahal is the trade name attached to its village-woven grade. These rugs were never about knot count. They were about wool quality, natural dyes and bold, generous drawing scaled for large Western rooms, and that is precisely why decorators have chased them for more than a century. The weave here is village work on a cotton foundation with a moderate knot count, heavy and supple rather than fine, which is what allows the pile to wear down to this thin, even surface and keep going for decades more. If you want to understand how a piece like this gets placed in the 1930s, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the dye, wear and construction clues we read on the back.